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Ask HN: Patents and Patenting - should I stop now?
Ask HN: Patents and Patenting - should I stop now?
Dear HN: I've been working on a weekend project where it involves generating a schedule and ultimately printing out a calendar for the client to take home.
When trying to find competitors for this I could not find anyone else doing this specialized calendar (doesn't mean they don't exist of course)
After not finding results I then searched patents, and couldn't find any related (again I realize it is not 100% not out there)
However I did come across a generic 'calendar generator' patent: https://www.google.com/patents/US20050257176
Does this mean I would need to license calendar generation in order to continue (or hope sales are never much such that I'm never a target)?
- beat 13y agoIt means you need to hire a professional patent attorney to do a proper patent search, discuss your tech with you, and probably apply for a defensive patent (or alternately, get a license from the original patent holder, especially if they aren't really using the patent on a competing product).
- alexdevkar 13y agoI'm not going to go as far as giving legal advice here, but don't blindly follow the advice above. Doing a patent search can be harmful because it gives you knowledge of the existence of the patents (which is legally significant). Approaching someone for a license can bring unnecessary attention. Most of all, spending time and money on getting a patent often doesn't make sense.